Politics

Rick Santorum Is Straight

About America, his politics and family values. But there are a few things he would like you not to do in your bedroom

In the commercial, four corpulent and oily Washington insiders are whooping it up in an elegant dining room. Through a swirl of cigar smoke, one of them calls out to the waiter, "Bring us a bottle of your very best champagne!" When the waiter raises the question of cost, the lout adds, "Don't worry. If we don't have enough money, we'll just give the bill to...them!" He gestures to the far end of the room, where a sad cluster of urchins sit around a barren table.

The camera pans to a tall, trim young man with a small child cradled in his arms. In a soft but ringing eastern tenor he introduces himself as Rick Santorum and conveys his disgust for the political fat cats "running up the deficit and passing the bill on to your children and mine." After he pledges to "end their greedy spending practices," the camera cuts to one of the politicos staring at the bill, snickering, "Time for another tax increase!" The commercial concludes with a rousing slogan: JOIN THE FIGHT.

They loved that ad in Pennsylvania. In 1992 voters responded to it by handing Santorum a second term in the U.S. Congress. Two years later, the ad was trotted out again to elect him to the Senate. Funny and poignant, it seduced the viewer with a bit of mystery. Send this courageous fellow into that dining room, it suggested, and see how things change.

This June, more than a decade after the commercial first appeared, Santorum sat at a corner table in the ornate Senate dining room, vanquishing a platter of broiled sea scallops. He looked a bit out of place—a vaguely untutored, overgrown schoolboy with a hook nose and oversize teeth, aura-deficient if handsome in a lopsided way. His hips had widened and a dab of gray had infiltrated his sideburns, yet he still seemed very much the lonely outsider.

But he was not. One by one, the insiders came to him, joking with him, doing everything but mussing his hair. "Hey, bruddah!" called out Pete Domenici from New Mexico, clamping his seventyone-year-old hand on Santorum's shoulder.

"Now, you keep your name out of the press," admonished the senior senator from Utah, 69-year-old Orrin Hatch, as he flashed his lipless smile.

Even former Oregon senator Bob Packwood, age 70 and nimbly reborn as a lobbyist, sidled up to Santorum's table to slyly inquire, "Have I been reading about you?"

Santorum laughed a victor's laugh. Six weeks after he had infamously spelled out his "problem with homosexual acts" to an Associated Press reporter, the resulting firestorm had dissipated into just another sunny day in the clubby Senate dining room. Santorum was still the third most powerful GOP senator on the Hill, still on track to become majority leader by 2006. His hoary colleagues had been through this kind of thing with him before, when Santorum had disrespected President Clinton by repeatedly referring to him as "Bill" on the Senate floor and when he had reportedly called Senator Dianne Feinstein of California a bitch. Now he'd used the words homosexuality and incest in the same context, prompting groans from the moderates and condemnations from the liberals. But from his own, from the right, there came only a big brother's knowing chuckle: feisty, pesky Rick—what's he gonna say next?

"People say I'm polarizing," the 45-year-old senator said that Friday afternoon, the words tumbling out in an emotive spasm. His altar-boy face clouded over in meditation. "I don't personally think I'm polarizing. But I do say what I believe. And I think I have an obligation to do that." Before Santorum could explain what he meant by this, Packwood stood up from the adjacent table. Motioning to the dining companion he had been lobbying, the ex-senator told Santorum with mock gravity, "You did not see this."

Santorum's face split open into a grin. "See what?" he asked.

Nodding approvingly, Packwood bellowed over his shoulder, "And I never read about you."

Santorum laughed, and muttered with genuine appreciation, "He's great." But long after the slick Beltway lifer had vacated the room, the humor in that exchange remained as elusive as Santorum's obligation to speak his mind. Pennsylvanians had sent him to Washington to shake things up. Was this what they had in mind— Santorum rattling his saber at homosexuality while trading gibes with a reptilian serial adulterer? Having joined the fight, would they now join in loving the sinner while hating the sin? It is a curious morality that Santorum promulgates, compassionate conservatism encased in a shield of Realpolitik with a snarl of fundamentalist intolerance. But promulgate it he does; and unexpected as it may seem, political momentum is by no means against him.

"I wasn't supposed to be here in the first place," he said. "I see every moment I'm here as a blessing—and a moment to do good." He said this with calm matter-of-factness, in a way that fended off skepticism as well as the aching question: What exactly does Rick Santorum mean by doing good? He did not, as it turns out, arrive at his definition overnight. And yet he cannot wait. He is inside now. Time for good to raise hell.

···

"I don't have any road-to-Damascus experiences in my life," he said. "It's sort of..." His mind flailed for a bit, and his face tightened, it seemed, with the brutal labor of self-examination. "I'm a poor planner," he offered. "What I have a good nose for—or maybe I've been blessed with an eye for—is the opportunities that are important."

The rise of Richard J. Santorum from obscure renegade to Newt Gingrich water boy to upwardly mobile Senate moralizer is a feat of pluck, dumb luck and conservative idealism. Above all, however, it is a triumph of his searing political instincts. His friends marvel at his ability to "adapt," "refocus," "fill a void," "see an opportunity" and even "transform himself." In Pennsylvania, a commonwealth best known for tempered statesmen like Arlen Specter, John Heinz and Bill Scranton, Santorum's power grabbing may appear unseemly—but only in retrospect. For like other famous moralizers, he came upon us like a thief in the night.

One afternoon in the mid-1970s, Phil English knocked on a dormitory door. As chairman of Pennsylvania's College Republicans, he had been sent to Penn State's main campus by the campaign staff of Senate candidate John Heinz to recruit a leader for a new chapter. The young man who answered the door did not, in appearance, stand out. Rather, he fit in: lankily good-looking, frat boy in manner, with a quick tongue and a lousy beard. The Italian keenness to his facial features came from his father, a Veterans Administration psychologist, who had immigrated from the lakeside town of Riva del Garda at the age of 8. His mother worked full-time as a nurse. The family had moved from West Virginia to Butler, Pennsylvania, to Chicago—all of which meant that he had learned how to fend for himself, how to size up new environments in a hurry. Ideas were not his stock in trade. Action was.

Young Rick's chapter quickly became "something of a legend within the state and national organization," English remembers. "He represented a group who thought it was critical to expand the College Republicans' outreach—he didn't want it to be clubbish. He spoke the language of the students, and he made it cool to be for Reagan."

He was also in one hell of a hurry, though to what end no one, including Santorum, knew. While accumulating an MBA and a law degree, he managed local campaigns and worked as chief of staff for state senator Doyle Corman. In Harrisburg political circles, Santorum displayed a knack for ingratiating himself with the well connected while thoroughly alienating those who were not. Socially awkward in his jacket and tie, he left many peers with the impression that he would have no political future beyond city council.

But less than two years after he was hired by a Pittsburgh corporate law firm—where he amused himself by lobbying on behalf of the World Wrestling Federation—the fidgety attorney decided to run for Congress. Aghast friends like Corman tried to talk him into a cozy statehouse seat. His opponent was a liberal Democrat named Doug Walgren, a well-funded seven-term incumbent. Santorum responded with a textbook grassroots campaign. He wooed legions of volunteers from the College Republicans and pro-life groups, but his stump speeches were careful not to offend moderate voters.

"There was not a great ideological content to that race," notes Woody Turner, the campaign's finance chairman. Instead, the upstart attacked the incumbent for voting for a congressional pay raise and for living exclusively in the Washington, D.C., area.

"In 1990 people were really pissed off at [George Herbert Walker] Bush and the Congress over this budget impasse," recalls political analyst Jon Delano, who helped run Walgren's campaign. "Santorum played right into the anti-incumbent national mood." Two years before H. Ross Perot and four years before Newt Gingrich, he caught the first frothing wave of the Angry White Male, and he rode it all the way to the nation's capital.

By this time, Santorum had decided to "get all of the fun out, the indiscretions, whatever you want to call them." During the campaign, he had married Karen Garver. The two had met while Rick was recruiting her for his law firm. They began raising a family and attending church. But a moral certitude had not yet entered Santorum's rhetoric. On the subject of abortion, he recalled, "I was trying to put people off [with] 'I'm still thinking through this.' " In fact, he never once brought up the topic on the House floor.